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G.O.P., Energized, Weighs How Far to Take Inquiries

Representative Darrell Issa, center right, on Wednesday, when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. testified in the House.Credit
Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The investigations ensnaring the White House have unified the Republican Party, energized a political base shattered by election losses and given common purpose to lawmakers divided over a legislative agenda.

The most pressing question for Congressional Republicans is no longer how to finesse changes to immigration law or gun control, but how far they can push their cases against President Obama without inciting a backlash of the sort that has left them staggering in the past.

With the House set on Friday to convene the first of its hearings into the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, the lessons learned from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, which cost Republicans in elections in 1998, have been on display in recent days. Republicans took obvious pains to balance their investigatory zeal with a promise to stay committed to a legislative agenda.

In a television appearance Wednesday, Representative Darrell Issa, the often aggressive California Republican who is leading multiple inquiries, struck a notably calm tone and promised to work with Mr. Obama. Just hours earlier, Mr. Issa had a nasty exchange with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Our job is to legislate, and we’re trying to legislate things that will help create jobs in our country,” Mr. Boehner said. “But we also have a responsibility, under the Constitution, to provide oversight of the executive branch of government.”

In private, House lawmakers say, the speaker — a member of the leadership in the Clinton era — has also urged caution. Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, who has led the charge on the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, said the speaker had urged him to move slowly and methodically — contrary, he acknowledged, to his inclinations. And House leaders have shown “great reluctance” to allow House committees to issue subpoenas, even as rank-and-file members and the conservative political base have been demanding them, Mr. Chaffetz said.

Representative Charles Boustany Jr., Republican of Louisiana and a key driver in an investigation of the I.R.S. by the Ways and Means Committee, said, “I’m being very cautious not to overplay my hand.”

Working against those methodical plans, however, are the personal passions of the rank and file. Mr. Chaffetz on Thursday repeated his refusal to take the impeachment of the president “off the table.” Representative Michele Bachmann, the Republican firebrand from Minnesota, joined in.

“As I have been home in my district in the Sixth District of Minnesota,” Mrs. Bachmann said, “there isn’t a weekend that hasn’t gone by that someone says to me: ‘Michele, what in the world are you all waiting for in Congress? Why aren’t you impeaching the president? He’s been making unconstitutional actions since he came into office.’ ”

Republicans say they are mainly determined to get at the truth, and they question efforts to put their intensifying pursuit of the administration in political terms. Even the most ardent conservatives have adopted a tone of sobriety.

“It’s not like we’re trying to hurry or trying to slow it down. We’re just trying to proceed at the speed that gets to the truth,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who was one of the first lawmakers to dig into the I.R.S. controversy.

But Republicans privately acknowledge political benefits like rekindling the fervor of the Tea Party — a key ingredient in 2010 Congressional victories — particularly given the fact that the I.R.S. was subjecting those very groups to special scrutiny.

“Few things can get the conservative base as fired up as being targeted by an agency in the government of a president they already strongly dislike,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is already using the I.R.S. case against some Senate Democrats who are up for re-election.

As of now, Republican strategists say they do not expect voters to flood the polls in November 2014 to vote against the president’s party over Benghazi, the seizure of phone logs of Associated Press reporters, or even the political intrusion by the I.R.S. Instead, they say, Republicans will use the controversies to undermine Mr. Obama’s credibility, question his competence and diminish his political capital. The cases also help them tar the health care law, gun control efforts and Mr. Obama’s regulatory agenda as just more examples of government overreach.

At the outset of his second term, President George W. Bush was able to prosecute the Iraq war with little political interference, despite its unpopularity. It was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 that cemented a reputation for incompetence that dogged the Bush administration to its end. Republicans are working off the same playbook.

“It’s a little perplexing to have the president continue to say he just learns of these things from the news media, when the president is the head of our government,” said Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

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At the very least, the Republicans’ conservative base — demoralized by broad election losses last November — is rising in a chorus of outrage. And the Republican targets continue to proliferate, with no end in sight for the hearings and investigations, which are only now getting off the ground.

“This is just the beginning,” Mr. Boustany said. “I want to emphasize that. We have a lot of work left to do in getting to the root of this.”

The deadly attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi remain the subject of investigations by several Congressional committees. Questions are only starting on the Justice Department’s broad seizure of telephone records of The A.P.

And Republicans are crying scandal over other matters that have yet to reach the same level of attention, including a request for money that Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, made to private insurers to promote the president’s health care law.

A group of House and Senate Republicans on Thursday called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate Ms. Sebelius’s fund-raising efforts.

“I can’t remember a time when there’s been this many controversial issues come to light all at the same time,” Mr. Walden, the Oregon Republican, said.

Mr. Boehner, in suggesting that officials should be jailed in the I.R.S. investigation, has led the condemnations with his own loud baritone.

“Nothing dissolves the bonds between the people and their government like the arrogance of power here in Washington,” he said. “That’s what the American people are seeing today from the Obama administration, remarkable arrogance.”

To veteran lawmakers, the sudden proliferation of investigations cannot help but raise the ghost of 1998. After seizing control of Congress in 1995, Republicans opened investigations into the White House Travel Office, allegations of malfeasance around the Whitewater Development Corporation, and claims of campaign finance improprieties in the 1996 presidential campaign. Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, famously shot a melon in trying to prove that the White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster Jr. did not commit suicide.

But it was the impeachment of Mr. Clinton that cost Republicans seats in the House, cost Newt Gingrich his job as House speaker, and ultimately lifted a moribund Democratic president from the political depths.

Mr. Gingrich said in an interview that the parallel could be taken only so far. Impeachment, he said, was about perjury, not sexual indiscretion, but that was lost on most Americans — much to the fault of the House Republicans.

“If we had been calmer and more focused, we would have done better and had a better argument for the American people,” he said.

This time, the questions around the I.R.S., the A.P. subpoena, Benghazi and Ms. Sebelius arise not from Mr. Obama personally, but from the actions of his administration, and they go at the very least to Mr. Obama’s ability to govern. At worst, Mr. Gingrich said, investigations will move toward whether senior White House officials knew of improper or even illegal acts and chose to cover them up in an election year.

“It’s always the cover-up that kills you,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P., Energized, Weighs How Far To Take Inquiries. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe